Definitely depends on the knife. On a larger knife or a knife designed with a useful choil, it gives you much better control when using the tip of the blade. Also a choil on a folding knife becomes an extra security feature, since it will be harder for the blade to snap shut if the lock fails.

It can also be a compromise between blade length and handle length, effectively cutting a few inches off the overall length of your knife. The part of the blade with the choil will still reach into a soft medium, and when you need to use the knife for other things, you get more handle space. Something with the standard mudder handle is a good example of this, because the handle is smaller than it would have had to be if the choil wasn't there.

So I would say it depends on what the knife is going to be used for, how big it is and how it is designed.